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hearken to the defence which he made now unto them. And when they heard that he spake in the Hebrew tongue to them, although there was already a great silence, it is written that they kept the more silence.

The silence for prayer at a Quakers' meeting has often been admired, in passing, by writers and talkers not in the main over friendly to Friends.

The Baroness Tautphous graphically describes the effect of tolling the evening prayer bell in certain Alpine regions. The tolling occurs at supper time, and the clatter of knives and forks and tongues ceases on the instant, and an awful stillness takes place, unbroken by word or movement until the last sound of the bell has died away. "It had always struck Hamilton as something very Mahometan-like, this sudden call to prayer."

Hartley Coleridge thinks that the practice of the old church, ("for the Church of Rome did understand these things,”) the solemn opening of the text, the call to prayer, the interval of silence, broken only by the dropping of the beads, the occupation of priest and people in one act of mute adoration, must have been exceedingly impressive.

More so in its way, at any rate, than embarrassed silence occurring after prayers, of the kind commemorated by D'Ewes in the annals of the Long Parliament; when, "prayers being ended, a silence ensued for awhile," which was only terminated by the shrewd suggestion of D'Ewes, "that somebody must break off our silence, because else our delay by silence would be as dangerous as our unnecessary disputes." Strafford's fate being adhuc sub judice, no wonder the judex held his breath for awhile, now and then.

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It was after an awful silence of a few minutes" that Maria Theresa, in her great strait, perplexed in the extreme, came forward from the tribune, and appealed to her Hungarians, in words that, although in Latin, roused them to shout, till the welkin rang, the enthusiastic response and resolve, Moriamur pro rege nostro Maria Theresa!

TO EVERY STAR A NAME, TO EVERY HAIR A NUMBER.

I'

PSALM cxlvii. 4; ST. LUKE xii. 6, 7.

NTERMEDIATELY and yet immediately between the psalmist's declaration that great is the Lord and of great power, and His wisdom infinite; and that He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, or giveth medicine to heal their sickness; there stands the verse, "He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names." Anon we read how He feedeth the young ravens which call upon Him. That reminds us of a later revelation of Him who, in these last days, hath spoken unto us by His Son: "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered." "Lift up your eyes," He had said, in those earlier times when in divers manners He spake to the fathers by the prophets, and while speaking of the heavens He had stretched out as a curtain: "Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created all these things, that bringeth out their host by number; He calleth them all by names." Known to Him are all His works, known severally, known individually, and as such cared for. To every star in illimitable space He has given a name, and to every hair on a man's head its number. In this kind of way is Scripture apt to draw a broad deep line of demarcation between pantheism and a personal God.

Recognition by name is ever a matter of interest, and sometimes of grateful wonder, to the flattered object of it. We seem to hear a Nathanael exclaim, in pleased perplexity, Whence knowest Thou me? The Good Shepherd calleth His own sheep by name.

There are forty feeding like one, says the poet, of cattle in a meadow; and to the undiscerning gaze of an indifferent passer by, the forty are as one. But to the herdsman they are forty times one, each with a form, and perhaps a character, distinct from those of the other thirty-nine.

Endowed with a range of faculties above his fellows is that

man held to be, who, like Cæsar with his soldiery, has the gift of for ever remembering `the name once heard of every face once seen. To his fellows, by courtesy (to them) so called, he seems more or less godlike; or at lowest, but a very little lower than the angels.

It is beyond the power of human capacity, says Locke, in his chapter on General Terms, to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with; every bird and beast men saw, every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding. "If it be looked on as an instance of a prodigious memory, that some generals have been able to call every soldier in their army by his proper name, we may easily find a reason why men have never attempted to give names to each sheep in their flock, or crow that flies over their heads; much less to call every leaf of plants, or grain of sand, that came in their way, by a peculiar name." Readers of Plutarch will be reminded of this passage by the often mention that biographer makes of the skill shown by some of his heroes, and by them assiduously cultivated, of identifying a mass of men individually by name. a little, by his account, it made doubly sure the already assured popularity of Themistocles, that he succeeded in charging his memory with the names of the citizens, so as readily to call each Athenian by his own. Of Crassus again Plutarch tells us that there was not a Roman, however mean and insignificant, whom he did not salute, or whose salutation he did not return, by name. Of Cato (Uticensis), that when a law was made forbidding any man who solicited office, to take nomenclators1 with

Not

1 When the Romans stood candidates for any office, and wanted to ingratiate themselves with the people, they would take with them a so called nomenclator, a slave, whose business it was to learn the names and conditions of the citizens, and secretly inform his master, that the latter might know how to salute them by their proper names. So Butler, in his Satire on the Abuse of Human Learning:

"As Roman noblemen were wont to greet

And compliment the rabble in the street,
Had nomenclators in their train, to claim
Acquaintance with the meanest by his name;

him, he was the only one that obeyed it, for he had mastered already the names of all the citizens. And of Cicero, that he made a point of committing to memory not only their names, but those of their kith and kin.

Cyrus is historically, or by historical courtesy, credited with the power of repeating the name of every man in his great army.1 Wonderful, says De Quincey, is the effect upon soldiers of such enduring and separate remembrance, which operates always as the most touching kind of personal flattery, and which, in every age of the world since the social sensibilities of men have been much developed, military commanders are found to have played upon as the most effectual chord in the great system which they

And by so mean contemptible a bribe
Trepanned the suffrages of every tribe."

It augured but poorly for Sir T. F. Buxton's success as a candidate for parliamentary honours, when he had to write, from Weymouth: "The worst of it is, I do not know above a third of their faces, and the names of about one in a hundred; so I am in momentary [sic] danger of grasping the hand, and inquiring with the kindest solicitude after the welfare of the wife and family, of a man who never saw Weymouth before in his life."

Macaulay is careful to tell us of Thomas Wharton, in his elaborate portraiture of that unscrupulous statesman, that, as a candidate, he was irresistible; for he never forgot a face that he had once seen; nay, in the towns in which he sought to establish an interest, he remembered, not only the voters, but their families. "His opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the affability of his deportment, and owned that it was impossible to contend against a great man who called the shoemaker by his Christian name, who was sure that the butcher's daughter must be growing a fine girl, and who was anxious to know whether the blacksmith's youngest boy was breeched."-History of England, iv. 458.

1 In reference to which capacity, an essayist on the subject of long memories, who denies the fact of a man being gifted with extraordinary mnemonic powers to be by possibility a source of high gratification to any one but himself and his creditors, and who affirms that to the man's friends the endowment may be a cause of positive annoyance,-makes the remark, how stupendous must have been the bore if Cyrus frequently indulged his generals with a display of the accomplishment!

Contrast this capacity of the Cyruses and Cæsars with the conspicuous absence of it in such dandy officers as Beau Brummell, who once served in the 10th Hussars, the Prince Regent being then colonel of that regiment, and who is said to have known the troop he commanded only by the peculiar nose of one of the men; insomuch that, a transfer of men having once been made, he rode up to the wrong troop, and, to prove himself right -the only proof he could offer-pointed to the nose in question. It was his north star, a guiding light to him, even as was Bardolph's, as Falstaff mockingly, merrily maintained, to Falstaff.

modulated; some few, by a rare endowment of nature; others, as Napoleon Buonaparte, by elaborate mimicries of pantomimic

art.

La Bruyère reckons among the gifts of heaven needful to a reigning power, une mémoire heureuse et très-présente, qui rappelle les besoins des sujets, leurs visages, leurs noms. The Absalom of Dryden's poem, fawning on the populace, is pictured

"On each side bowing popularly low :

His looks, his gestures, and his words he frames,
And with familiar ease repeats their names.
Thus formed by nature, furnished out with arts,
He glides unfelt into their secret hearts."

Our Henry the Second is said to have always known again those he once saw. Michelet says of Lewis the Eleventh that he seemed to know every one, to know the whole kingdom, man by man; which, in his instance however, was (pour cause) matter rather for fear than gratulation. Montezuma, monarch of unhappy renown in the annals of Mexico, knew the name of every man in the army, and was careful to discriminate his proper rank. Wallenstein's assiduous cultivation of the art is turned to account by Schiller, at the review of the cuirassiers by the Duke of Friedland, who says to one of them:

"I know thee well. Thou art from Brüggen in Flanders. Thy name is Henry Mercy. Thou wert cut off on the march, surrounded by the Hessians, and didst fight thy way with an hundred and eighty men through their thousand.

Cuirass. 'T was even so, general!

Wallen. (to another.) Thou wert among the volunteers that seized the Swedish booty at Altenberg.

2nd Cuir. Yes, general!

Wallen. I forget no one with whom I have exchanged words."

1 Carnot took the utmost pains to make himself acquainted with the names and characters of the soldiers for whom he " 'organised victory"; and such is said to have been the extent of his information, that it was rare for even a simple private of merit to escape his ken. Napoleon, than whom no one knew better, says Alison, how to win the affections of his men, would enhance the effect of his naturally retentive memory by inquiring privately of the officers who were the veterans of Egypt or Italy in their regiments; and when he passed them in review, he would stop the man

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